Chapter 1

1. Know Where You Are

When you are confronted with a project, initiative, or objective and don’t know where to start, start by painting the picture.

“If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.”

—Steve Jobs

It was eighty-three degrees in the city that day. The sun was shining, and lower Manhattan was abuzz with the sounds of demolition and construction. At 3:37 p.m., a citizen called 911 to report a fire on a scaffolding at a building near Rector Street, one block from the World Trade Center site. The NYC Fire Department (FDNY) sounded an alarm two seconds later to dispatch two engines, two ladders, and a battalion chief. Additional calls poured in, all reporting a fire at the vacant thirty-eight-story Deutsche Bank Building at 130 Liberty Street, which was undergoing abatement of hazardous materials and demolition due to the damage caused when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed onto it on September 11, 2001.

At 3:40 p.m., the responding units sent a 10-75 radio code, or “All Hands,” signifying that all the personnel from the responding units were engaged in fighting the fire. In other words, it was a serious fire and more resources were needed. Over the next hour, additional alarms were sounded to activate more emergency personnel. Hundreds arrived on the scene to battle the blaze, which was not behaving as most high-rise fires would. Something different was happening here.

At 4:38 p.m., a roll call was conducted by fire department personnel for the fire floors fifteen through seventeen. Some firefighters did not respond, so a Mayday was sounded for the missing members. This happened while crews stretched a hose line up the side of the building to get water on the fire, which was necessary because of an inoperable standpipe.

The inside of the building presented a maze, as each floor had been partitioned into asbestos and hazardous material containment areas for the abatement process, with temporary walls constructed to trap hazardous materials during the cleanup. These partitions blocked egress and stairwells. Negative air pressure ventilation systems designed to keep hazardous materials inside the building changed the behavior of the smoke and fire (Kugler 2007). The smoke was not rising into the air (as is typical of a high-rise fire) but was sucked back into the building. The negative pressure also changed the behavior of the fire, pulling it inward and forcing it downward from the fire floors to lower floors.

The building had been under floor-by-floor demolition while abatement was done simultaneously. The crews would conduct the hazardous material abatement on one floor, and when they finished, they’d move to the next floor down while a demolition crew worked on the floor just vacated. The standpipe and sprinkler system were inoperable as a result of the teardown.

The entire project to take down the Deutsche Bank Building had been filed under a series of alteration permits (NYC Fire Wire 2016) that regulated partial demolition practices for dismantling “structural members, floors, interior bearing walls, and/or exterior walls or portions thereof.” The project was not filed as a full building demolition, which would have been treated differently and was defined as the “dismantling, razing, or removal of all of a building or structure” (City of New York 2008).

At 5:20 p.m. that day, two firefighters were found unconscious and transported to an area hospital. At 5:36 p.m., a third member was found and also transported to the hospital. Less than half an hour later, two of the members experienced full cardiac arrest; firefighters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino tragically gave their lives in battling the fire.

The tower continued to burn for seven hours before firefighters finally extinguished the flames. Black smoke had pumped into the air from this sacred spot near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. The death of two firefighters demanded answers, and the city needed to understand how a fire of this magnitude had occurred and killed two of NYC’s bravest. Mayor Bloomberg called the incident “another cruel blow to our city and to the Fire Department” (Rivera and Santos 2007), alluding to the FDNY’s losing so many (343, to be precise) only six years earlier at the World Trade Center.

A few days after the fire, my boss told me I needed to understand the process of building demolition in NYC. This was my first job in NYC government, in the Mayor’s Office of Operations where I worked as a policy analyst at the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s second term. Diving right into this experience was my only option because, as the new guy, I didn’t know much of anything. I had few relationships in city government at the time, but I dived in with a curious mindset and started to paint a picture of the situation with tools I knew would help me.

Start with Curiosity

The first step in any project is to be curious and dive in. Strip away what you think you know and start asking questions. I always relished figuring out how things worked (or didn’t work as the case may be), and you should enjoy the process of digging into an operation and learning how people do their jobs.

In this case, city hall had enlisted our team’s help in understanding the information flow among the principal city agencies that had a regulatory role in the teardown of buildings. Our team, the Project Management Group at the Mayor’s Office of Operations, was essentially a group of in-house consultants who were tasked with large-scale, interagency projects of mayoral priority. We excelled at dissecting complex projects into actionable steps and understanding the nuts-and-bolts processes that made the city’s vast government hum.

Being curious and knowing little about this specific problem set allowed me to ask questions from a fresh perspective with absolutely no baseline assumptions or inaccurate perceptions.

The main question from my perspective was why no one had fully understood what was going on inside this building when three key city agencies played a regulatory role in its razing.

What Goes On inside the Black Box?

We convened an interagency task force to kick off the work about to take place. Representatives of several city agencies would gather to discuss how the city was going to ensure that the problems that led to the deaths of two firefighters would be fixed and never allowed to happen again.

A day or two later, I sat in the conference room for our kickoff meeting at 253 Broadway, directly across the street from city hall. The leaders of the three principal agencies had gathered to discuss the scale and scope of our project, and my boss laid out how we would delve into their operations and processes to understand what had happened. We packed in around the long table in the windowless room. Pens and notebooks rested on the table as my boss laid out our approach, commanding the room from one end of the table. That’s when a senior chief from the FDNY leaned forward and offered the following succinct statement: “None of this would have happened if we knew what goes on inside that black box.”

To abate the hazardous materials, the crews had built containment areas or structures that kept the hazardous materials from escaping into the air. These structures, combined with negative air pressure machines, kept the asbestos and debris inside the building as cleanup crews in hazmat suits and ventilators removed all the particles. The problem was that the building’s containment areas were built in ways that blocked exits, stairwells, hallways, and doorways (Baker 2008). A firefighter crawling on the floor with zero visibility faced a very hard time in navigating that labyrinth of structures and machinery.

This is what the chief was talking about. These containment areas were in effect mazes, and the FDNY had little knowledge of what was inside them. Why? Because the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), not the FDNY, regulated hazardous material abatement and how it was performed. And who oversaw the teardown of the building itself? The Department of Buildings (DOB). Meanwhile, the FDNY was responsible for overseeing the building inspections that ensured that no life-threatening safety issues were present in the case of an emergency, such as a fire. All told, this was a complicated, interconnected web of activities and regulations with no central authority overseeing all the components to ensure that each stakeholder had a complete picture of what was happening inside that building.

On the day I joined the chief, my boss, others from the city agencies, and members of the mayor’s staff from city hall, I had been in my role for less than three months and had only recently set foot in NYC for the first time to start my job in the Mayor’s Office of Operations. Just prior, I had completed studies for my master’s degree and, for a summer, had been an intern for James J. Fiorentini, the mayor of Haverhill, Massachusetts. I knew from those experiences that city government, at any scale, was complicated and required a great deal...